Introduction

Culture settings in .NET are a very important but often ignored part of development, they define how numbers, dates and currencies are displayed and parsed and you application can easily break when it is exposed to a new culture.

You can see in the capture above lines 1 & 3 use the South African culture settings it gets from the operating system. What if I want to force say an American culture globally? There was no way before .NET 4.5 to do that.

What .NET 4.5 adds?

By merely adding one line to the top of the project, all threads, including the one we are in get the same culture: